Cerbera

Ah yes - he's on the cafe too ! That's @Astronomic, who has a blog here. Check out all his other vids from the Blogs menu ! CBR

The main point of the poly pen is that it operates independently of which mode you are in, allowing to grab points, edges or polys regardless of mode. Certain modes produce certain variations in behaviour but most functions work in all modes. It is essentially a combination of many other tools - select, move, bridge, extrude, add point, line cut, weld and a few others to boot. There's quite a lot to it, so much so that it justifies a reasonably lengthy video to explain it all ! Fortunately, cafe founder @3DKiwi has made you one of those. https://youtu.be/dCFE6ZQ1JmM CBR

Oh that's weird - I modelled mine directly over the top of your original splines. Hang on - I'll get you my file if that helps... 3d-skull cbr.c4d There you go... The next stage is to use the brush tool / soft selection / sculpting tools to add some depth to the bits that need it. If you can give me a bit more of a description about what you are trying to make - which bits should be flat etc, I can give you more precision advice... CBR

Ok, you are missing some stuff there. Instead of having even regular quad polygons like I tried to show you, you have some quads, but rather more triangles and complex poles (vertex junctions with more than 5 points). This will not work with subdivision. When I said yours needs to look like mine, it really does need to look almost exactly like that so that you have loops in the right places to extrude things. That will not work with your mesh in its current state. But don't be discouraged, I would have been extremely surprised if you had got this right first time. Why not use the background image function in cinema (viewport settings / back) to load in my example and directly copy the polygons in the first or 2nd pics - I have already solved this to quads for you so no need to try and do that yourself. CBR

You're welcome. You'll get quicker with time. I've been doing modelling 10 years, which is why this took me 10 minutes :) CBR

You want to start with a disc primitive with an inner radius to get the outer circle. I used 32 segments, which is about right. Then delete half the polys, get it under symmetry, and begin outlining the forms with the polypen in front view, so you build it flat initially. These are the stages, roughly, of doing that... 1. Outline the main forms. Leave a hole for the nose. 2. Fill in the gaps and solve to quads. 3. Add control edge loops to sharpen the corners under subdivision 4. SDS, and refine... 5. Select groups of polys and use soft selection in dome Mode to raise sections of the mesh (perspective view). CBR

No don't start with ngons like that - there are way too many points to do it well that way. Use the polygon pen tool to draw nice even polys like mine above, using symmetry so you only have to do half of it. Note my 100% quads, which is what subdivision surfaces require... CBR

The knife tool does not delete polys on its own. But I'd need to see it to know what you are doing wrong here. Here's what the topology should look something like... CBR

We can see why your current mesh is so unsuitable when we make it editable and look at the topology, which as we can see here, is fairly horrendous. These sort of massive ngons simply cannot hold their form under subdivision. The only way to try and save this would be to activate Single Object in the Extrude, and change the caps method to Regular Grid Quads, with the distance set to the same as you would set in the spline attributes, having changed the interpolation to subdivided. Now it won't collapse under subdivision, but this is still not ideal, and we are now so high poly that adding SDS does nothing that the bevels in the original Extrude could have done alone ! There is no actual depth information to this skull - the extrude can only do so uniformly, so if you want this to be properly 3D, starting again with polygons, using the splines merely as a visual guide will be the best thing you can do here. the topology you create will be based specifically on which parts you plan to move out to create depth later. Unfortunately, edge flow planning is one of those things that tends to come several years after you start doing it, but essentially you should aim for regular even polygons everywhere that are just dense enough to describe the form. Use symmetry so you only have to make half of it ! CBR

I suspect will be very lucky to find a rig that will make a car walk like you want - that is not what most car rigs do ! So just be aware of that before you put the cash down... CBR

Yes, loads. Although Sub-D modelling takes years to be genuinely good at, to get started is fairly quick. Here's a good series with all the basics. Start with this one, which you shouldn't skip - lots of important info in there. then this one.. and then this one... ..and now you're off to a decent start... CBR

It gets points from me for out-ridiculous-ing the original, which takes some doing ! And respect for sheer amount of animation - however long did that take you ?! CBR

You need to be aware of the rules of Sub-D modelling. Splines in Extrudes create the sort of topology that is not really suitable for subdivision surfaces, which is why you'll get errors like this. Much better to build these things from polygons. But if you upload the scene file I'll see if there is anything that can be done with what you have... CBR

Then I would ask them for detailed information and additional drawings / reference for what that backside should look like. Still not enough info here to estimate properly I'm afraid. CBR

Very difficult to give a price without knowing what the animation is doing, or what happens round the back of the model - there could be a whole car interior round there ! CBR

You're welcome. Good to know it works in R19. CBR

Cinema is a little lacking in its normal controls, certainly in comparison to Max. We only have 2 commands for polygon normals, and you know about both of those. We have even less control over vertex normals, which is I think what you want to control here. So, for people that do want to do this there is a plugin which should help you (if you can get it to work in R19 - it is quite old !) http://frostsoft.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/vertex-normal-tool-plugin_80.html CBR

Oh dear. If you are new to modelling and animation, and have a very short turnaround time for this, your best bet is to sub-contract the job to someone with the skills to do it - you simply cannot learn to do that sort of thing in this amount of time. Let me know if you would like me to move this post to the Job line for you. CBR

I wasn't fully aware that Cinema did vertex colours. But a quick bit of Google-Fu reveals that it does, since R18 ! So that's a start. But I don't know how you get that colour data from your .obj into the tag. Do let us know how you get on ! :) CBR

There is a way round this. Instead of doing one loop cut and bevelling it to get those polys, do 2 loop cuts (in edge distance mode, not proportional) - that should avoid the distortion at the corners and give you that loop of polys. And rather than extruding them in, you could put the modelling axis at object center and ctrl-scale in from there on XZ. Of course I don't know what you're trying to make, or what you want that bit to look like, so that may or may not be viable for what you're doing. CBR

Reporting it now won't make any difference for years to come, as tools are planned and developed way in advance. But as I said in my first post, I have already suggested the straighten corners option, as I'm sure others have, so it may already be in the development cycle. But feel free to suggest it yourself via that page of the website. The more people asking the better ! :) CBR

It is possible to model without these problems if you know what Cinema can and can't do, and are prepared to work round the things it can't - I know - I do it every day, and I am able to solve most problems most of the time. Not necessarily as fast as it sounds like you want though ! You do seem very unhappy with the way this program models stuff. You might be happier in something like Modo or 3DS Max. The modelling tools in Cinema are on a slow gradual ramp of improvement, so if you hate the way the tools work all I can suggest is using something else. Or if speed is the ultimate factor for you, then maybe something like Sketchup is more suitable. CBR

Well, that is the method, and I am not aware of any others ! CBR

Unfortunately, you are correct that Cinema is just bad at this. 3DS MAX for example has a little checkbox with its extrude and inner extrude functions called 'straighten corners', which we are sadly lacking ! I'm afraid we must correct for this by hand until they rewrite the tool. I have already suggested it to MAXON on more than one occasion ! If you wanted to keep that area straight, why didn't you just Loop Cut with Preserve Curvature off to add the loop, which would have done exactly what you wanted (if I am understanding you correctly)... I don't understand what you are expecting here, or why the first lot of pictures are wrong - could you explain a bit more what you are expecting to see there ? I think the values in your first set of screenshots are what I would be expecting - I should check you are aware that the coordinates manager is not giving you the physical length of selected edges but rather their XYZ scales relative to the world axis. Annoyingly this happens whatever mode the modelling axis is set to. In an ideal world, like you I would like to be able to set that to 'Normal' and get the accurate length in the CM, but it's just not how this works. However you can measure edge distances accurately with the Measure & Construction Tool, which when locked to 2 points will live update as the distance between them changes. What that won't show you is the angle, and we don't have any tools I am aware of that will. Cinema's modelling toolset is a lot better than it used to be, but there is still some way to go... CBR

Generally speaking, if XS thickness goes wrong, then Extrude with Caps will probably do the same. Definitely do check your normals, as this is vital to all extrude operations. But to be honest this is such an appalling mesh, topology-wise, that the normal techniques I would use to sort this out just won't work here because it is almost impossible to practically wrangle that amount of triangles. I know 3D printing doesn't care what the topology is doing, but the techniques you need to save this very much do. If it was me, I would start again and build it from low poly and easily manipulatable quads, where I would add thickness before any subdivision or top panel details. You could use the retopo tools (polygon pen, poly snapping, shrink-wrap etc), to build this nicely on top of your existing model. CBR